Cosmic Chemistry

Do God and Science Mix?

John C Lennox

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780745981413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

"In this accessible and engaging introduction, [John Lennox] guides us through the great debates about science and faith, and offers incisive assessments of the issues." Alister McGrath, Professor of Science and Religion, University of Oxford

Is the rigorous pursuit of scientific knowledge really compatible with a sincere faith in God?

Building on the arguments put forward in God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?, Prof John Lennox examines afresh the plausibility of a Christian theistic worldview in the light of some of the latest developments in scientific understanding. Prof Lennox focuses on the areas of evolutionary theory, the origins of life and the universe, and the concepts of mind and consciousness to provide a detailed and compelling introduction to the science and religion debate. He also offers his own reasoning as to why he continues to be convinced by a Christian approach to explaining these phenomena.

Robust in its reasoning, but respectful in tone, this book is vital reading for anyone exploring the relationship between science and God.

PART 1

Surveying the Landscape

1

Introduction

This book is intended as an introduction to the ongoing science–religion debate. I have spent many years thinking about the issues involved and have tried to find a way, not only of navigating the terrain myself, but also of helping others to do the same. The questions that arise are the big questions that have exercised the human mind for thousands of years. The first one, said to have been asked, among others, by mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and theologian Martin Heidegger, is: Why is there something rather than nothing? Heidegger called it the ‘fundamental question of metaphysics’. It then rapidly spawns many other questions: Why, in particular, does the universe exist? Where did the cosmos come from, and where, if anywhere, is it heading? Is it the ultimate reality beyond which there is nothing, or is there something more? Can we expect an answer to physics Nobel laureate Richard Feynman’s question: ‘What is the meaning of it all?’ Another Nobel laureate, Albert Einstein, once said: ‘To know an answer to the question, “What is the meaning of human life?” means to be religious.’¹ And Wittgenstein said: ‘To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.’² Or, was philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell right when he said: ‘The universe is just there, and that’s all. No purpose, no meaning, just the brute fact of existence?’ And many today will say that science has buried God: there is no need for God any more, even if he does exist, which looks increasingly unlikely.

These questions have lost none of their attraction, as is evidenced by the vast literature to which they continue to give rise. It is virtually impossible to keep up with the topic, let alone digest and condense all its various ramifications. It is also completely impossible to squeeze it into the confines of a single book, however large.

As a result I cannot go into full detail at every stage of our discussions but will try to recommend further reading in order to help the reader who wishes to pursue matters in more depth. The subject matter can be complicated at times, but then all interesting things tend to be complicated – as some of us will have learned when we graduated from a toy car to a real one. I shall make every effort, however, to make myself intelligible. As C.S. Lewis put it: ‘I will be understood!’

I have developed my arguments advanced in this book in lectures, seminars, and discussions in many countries, and, although I feel that there is still much work to be done, it was at the urging of many of those present on such occasions that I originally made the attempt to write a book that would introduce the main issues and be a springboard for further discussion and exploration. I am grateful for the many questions, comments, and criticisms that have helped me in my task but, of course, I hold myself alone responsible for the remaining infelicities in this now revised and, I fear, much extended version.

Some comments about procedure are in order. I shall attempt to set the discussion in the context of the contemporary debate as I have followed it. I shall make frequent use of quotations from leading scientists and thinkers with a view to getting a clear picture of what those in the forefront of the debate are actually saying. I am, however, aware that there is always a danger of quoting out of context and in consequence not only ceasing to be fair to the person being quoted but also distorting the true picture. I hope that I have succeeded in avoiding that particular danger.

My mention of truth leads me to fear that some people of postmodernist persuasion may be tempted not to read any further, unless of course they are curious to read (and maybe even attempt to deconstruct) a text written by someone who actually believes in truth. For my part I confess to finding it curious that those who claim that there is no such thing as truth expect me to believe that what they are saying is true! Perhaps I misunderstand them, but they seem to exempt themselves from their general rubric so that what they are really saying is that there is no truth apart from what they say. They turn out to believe in truth after all.

In any case, scientists have a clear stake in truth. That is the one important point on which Richard Dawkins and I actually agree, as we made clear at the press conference that followed our debate on the topic of this book in the Oxford Natural History Museum in 2008. Why, otherwise, would we bother to do science? And it is precisely because I believe in the category of truth that I have tried only to use quotations that seem to represent an author’s general position fairly, rather than cite some statement which he or she made on some ‘off’ day. Any of us can be guilty of that kind of infelicity. In the end I must leave it to the reader to judge whether I have succeeded.

What about bias? No one can escape it, neither author nor reader. We are all biased in the sense that we all have a worldview that consists of our answers, or partial answers, to the questions that the universe and life throw at us. Our worldviews may not be fully, or even consciously, formulated, but they are there nonetheless. Our worldviews are of course shaped by experience and reflection. They can and do change – on the basis of sound evidence, one would hope.

The concern that is central to this book is, in its essence, a worldview question: Which worldview sits most comfortably with science – theism or atheism? Has science buried God or not? Let us see where the evidence leads.

God will be understood as in the Judaeo-Christian biblical tradition though we shall be mainly interested in the scientific aspects of the underlying question. That is, we shall focus on:

Question A. Does science – its history, presuppositions, and findings – provide evidence of a designing intelligence involved in the universe and life?

rather than:

Question B. What is the nature of that designing intelligence, if it exists?

Differentiating between these two questions has been the intellectual motivation behind the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, though the distinction has often not been clearly grasped resulting in a great deal of unnecessary and unhelpful misunderstanding. We shall say something about ID at the end of Chapter 3.

Tackling Question A will take us to the history and philosophy of science as well as the demarcation between science and philosophy. It will also involve consideration of research results from physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, and mathematics. We shall necessarily be paying careful attention to the philosophical implications of that research. The danger of doing this is that the reader may get the impression that I do not sufficiently appreciate the research that has produced those results in itself. I would like to reassure you that the very opposite is the case. I have spent a lifetime in research-level mathematics and, to take two further examples, I think that some of the work in physics on self-organizing systems and work in systems biology on the role of DNA, reductionism, and teleology in the living cell is impressive, sophisticated, and ground-breaking science. After all, Nobel Prizes have been awarded for some of this work.

The big questions mentioned at the commencement of this chapter were included in Stephen Hawking’s list of questions in his 2010 bestselling book The Grand Design,³ co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow, and they have lost nothing of their power to fire human imagination. Spurred on by the desire to climb the mountain peaks of knowledge and understanding, scientists have already given us spectacular insights into the nature of the universe we inhabit. On the scale of the unimaginably large, the Hubble telescope, from its orbit high above earth’s atmosphere, transmits stunning images of the heavens of hitherto unimaginable quality. At a much more modest level, down on earth in my tiny observatory in my garden, I am moved to wonder by seeing the Andromeda Galaxy, the Orion Nebula and the Ring Nebula, many other Messier objects, the planets and the moon, through my 10-inch telescope. On the scale of the unimaginably small, scanning tunnelling microscopes uncover the incredibly complex molecular structure of the living world with its information-rich macromolecules and its micro-miniature protein factories whose complexity and precision make even advanced human technologies look crude by comparison.

Are we and the universe, with its profusion of galactic beauty and subtle biological complexity, nothing but the products of irrational forces acting on mindless matter and energy in an unguided way, as those scientists who are atheists, still led by Richard Dawkins, constantly insist? Is human life ultimately only one, admittedly improbable, but nevertheless fortuitous, arrangement of atoms among many? In any case, how could we be in any sense special since we now know that we inhabit a tiny planet orbiting a fairly undistinguished star far out in an arm of a spiral galaxy containing billions of similar stars, a galaxy that is only one of billions distributed throughout the vastness of space?

What is more, say some, since certain basic properties of our universe, like the strength of the fundamental forces of nature and the number of observable space and time dimensions, are the result of random effects operating far back at the origin of the universe, then, surely, other universes, with very different structures, might well exist. Is, then, our universe only one in a vast array of parallel universes forever separated from each other? Is it not therefore absurd to suggest that human beings have any ultimate significance? Their measure in a multiverse would seem effectively reduced to zero.

Many scientists, therefore, think it would be an intellectually stultifying exercise in nostalgia to hark back to the early days of modern science when scientists such as Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Clerk Maxwell, for example, believed in an intelligent Creator God whose brainchild the cosmos is. Science has surely moved on from such primitive notions, squeezed God into a corner, killed, and then buried him by its all-embracing and satisfying explanations. God has, in the end, turned out to be no more substantial than the smile on a cosmic Cheshire cat. Unlike Schrödinger’s cat, God is no ghostly superposition of dead and alive – he is certainly dead. Furthermore, the whole process of his demise shows that any attempt to reintroduce gods of any kind – especially as a ‘god of the gaps’– is likely to impede the progress of science as it did in the time of the ancient Greeks. We can now see more clearly than ever before that naturalism (the view that nature is all that there is, that there is no transcendence) has no serious challengers, reigns supreme.

Peter Atkins, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University, while acknowledging the religious element in the historical development of science, defends the naturalistic view with characteristic vigour:

Science, the system of belief founded securely on publicly shared reproducible knowledge, emerged from religion. There is no reason to suppose that science cannot deal with every aspect of existence. Only the religious – among whom I include not only the prejudiced but the under-informed – hope there is a dark corner of the physical universe, or of the universe of experience, that science can never hope to illuminate. But science has never encountered a barrier, and the only grounds for supposing that reductionism will fail are pessimism on the part of scientists and fear in the minds of the religious.⁴

The idea that ‘science can deal with every aspect of existence’ is called scientism. It sounds impressive but it is actually not only false but logically incoherent. For the statement just quoted is not itself a statement of science and so if it is true it is false. We shall have occasion to explore scientism in more detail later as, in spite of its illogicality, it is deeply ingrained in the thinking of some leading scientists.

As an example of its reach, a conference at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California in 2006 discussed the theme: ‘Beyond belief: science, religion, reason and survival’. Addressing the question of whether science should do away with religion, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg said: ‘The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion… Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization.’ Unsurprisingly, Richard Dawkins went even further: ‘I am utterly fed up with the respect we have been brainwashed into bestowing upon religion.’ As I am writing now there is no evidence that either Weinberg or Dawkins have changed their opinions.

And yet, and yet… I still wish to ask: Are they right? Are all religious people to be written off as prejudiced and under-informed? Indeed not as, for example, it turns out that in the twentieth century 65.4 per cent of all Nobel laureates stated that Christianity was their religious preference.⁵ Some of them still do, like William Phillips, a physics Nobel Prize winner. So not all scientists who believe in God nowadays pin their hopes on ‘finding a dark corner of the universe that science can never hope to illuminate’ as Atkins rather wildly suggests. It would appear that he himself may belong to the group of the prejudiced and uninformed that he criticizes. Also, and most importantly, the majority, if not all of the early pioneers in science maintained that it was precisely their belief in a Creator that inspired their science to ever greater heights. For them it was the dark corners of the universe that science did illuminate that provided ample evidence of the existence and ingenuity of God.

And what of the biosphere? Is its intricate complexity really only apparently designed, as asserted by Richard Dawkins, Peter Atkins’ staunch ally in faith? (Yes, you read me correctly, atheism is a faith, a belief system, as we shall see.) Can rationality really arise through unguided natural processes working under the constraints of nature’s laws on the basic materials of the universe in some random way? Is the solution of the mind–body problem simply that rational mind ‘emerged’ from mindless body by undirected mindless processes?

Questions about the status of this naturalistic story do not readily go away,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Part 1: Surveying the Landscape
• Part 2: Science and Explanation
• Part 3: Understanding the Universe and Life
• Part 4: The Modern Synthesis
• Part 5: The Information Age
• Epilogue: Beyond Science But Not Beyond Reason
• Notes
• Index